Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives by John Sutherland (review)

John Sutherland opens his new book, Live of the Novelists, with a sextet of epigraphs. These capture the diverse range of authorial opinion on the value of biography in deciphering fiction. Those quoted range from Plutarch, the father of modern poetry, to the recent French crime writer, Jacques Bonnet. Of most relevance to this journal is the quotation from Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost (2007): “There’s a huge popular appetite for secrets. As for the biographical ‘explanation’ generally it makes matters worse by adding components that aren’t there and would make no aesthetic difference if they were” (xi). One can only be glad that Roth, despite his distaste for biographical speculation, did not follow the example of his early literary idol, Henry James, an author Sutherland also quotes as an epigraph: “‘My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter’ (before touching the light to a bonfire of his personal papers)” (xi). Sutherland’s study proves he heartily disagrees with these sentiments.

The eclectic nature of the epigraphs is representative of the book as a whole, at least in terms of genre. In his foreword Sutherland warns that his selection of writers is ‘idiosyncratic”—he is after all telling the history of fiction, not the history of literary fiction. As a result he describes his investigation (tellingly paraphrasing the alternative history author William Gibson) as “a wormhole through the cheese” (xiii). A justifiable qualm might be that in highlighting the popular fiction that enriched the publishing houses—and in doing so gave them the financial security to “chance their arm” with rarely profitable literary fiction—Sutherland includes rather too much of the cheese (140). While it is fascinating to learn that the American author, Prentiss Ingraham, wrote over a thousand novels, should he (along with at least five dozen similarly dubious inclusions) really deprive more significant authors of a position in this “history”? Most obvious in their omission are writers outside the Anglo-American remit. The first entry—that of the English Civil War author John Bunyan—includes references to Proust, Solzhenitsyn and D.H. Lawrence. Disappointed readers however will find that neither the first two nor any of their illustrious compatriots are given any wider consideration in this book.

Besides these frustrating non-Anglophone cul-de-sacs however, the inter-referential nature of Lives of the Novelists is a joy to experience. Though best suited as a reference book for short introductions to a wide range of authors, there are significant rewards for those who begin, quite dauntingly, at Bunyan (born 1628) and finish chronologically eight hundred pages later with the British-Indian author, Rana Dasgupta (born 1971). Each author’s section (resembling in size an undergraduate essay) is replete with antecedents and progeny, contextualizing the author within a wider literary pantheon. As such Roth appears within the text as early as the 1850s in a discussion of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s supposed incest: “But Philip Roth—abhorrer of biographers—pours cold water on it by noting, with much sarcasm, in Exit Ghost, that novelists do not use novels to confess their sins. It would be like inscribing love letters on lavatory walls” (88).

Sutherland himself appears to have little problem with biography and drops several personal anecdotes into the text. He tells us that “I spent ten years of my academic life compiling a guide to Victorian fiction. It involved the highly pleasurable task of reading some 3,000 novels,” perhaps explaining the swarm of biographically fascinating—yet artistically insignificant—authors included from that period (220). More amusingly he elucidates on his introduction, as a schoolboy, to John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1748; in terms of sexual controversy surely the Portnoy’s Complaint of the eighteenth century): “‘I wanked over it four times last night,’ said the white-faced friend who had passed it on to me” (23). Sutherland has retained this boyhood delight in the...